Days 193 and 194 - Wide Water — Captain Father John

Miles cruised 55, fuel purchased 210 gallons, fuel purchased $402, slip fee $93 , daily high temperature 78°f

We had a delightful cruise up the Indian River through the Crossover Canal to the Mosquito Lagoon.

The winds were light from the east and the ICW was very flat. Our only challenge is all the pesky sailboats and trawlers lumbering along the ICW. We slow down and request permission to pass each time. Our fuel burn is not much different at 9 mph or 25 mph so we prefer to get up and go. We depart several hours after the sailboats and trawlers, pass them along the way and arrive early at the next marina. It is a nice program that works for us and gives us time to visit the areas surrounding the marina.

We pulled into the Halifax Harbor Marina at Daytona Beach at 3:00 pm and fueled up and pumped out. We were visited by Dan and Carol Schlevensky. They are friends of Dale and Andy from Chicago. They are snowbirds that have owned a condo at Daytona Beach for 16 years. They have lots of stories about Bike Week and the Speedway. Dan and Carol took us on a driving tour of the boardwalk area. It is a very active area with amusement rides and lots of T-shirt shops and restaurants. We had dinner at a quaint Italian restaurant that could have been in the Bronx, New York complete with waiters with NY accents and personalities. Great food and service.

Dan and Carol were kind enough to give John and Priscilla a ride to the Daytona Beach airport to pick up an Enterprise rental car. We will drive to Stuart on Tuesday to attend the inspection on our new condo.

Bright and early on Tuesday morning John and Priscilla hopped into their white Jeep Compass rental car and drove three hours to Stuart to the Pierpoint condominium complex. The condo inspection was very positive. The inspector advised the condo has been very well maintained and has no issues. We sat around and enjoyed our wide water view and then headed over to Pietro’s for lunch with Dan, Iris and their friend Mary Berkley.

The view of the Atlantuc Ocean from Pietro’s

By coincidence Mary is buying a condo in the building next to Dan and Iris in Cedar Point. Her condo inspection is scheduled for Wednesday. We wish her good results.

I visited the Pierpoint condo business offic to provide a list of references including a bank reference so the condo board can vet us and make sure we meet their standards. We will also have a personal interview to make we understand all the condo rules. The condo rules are 31 pages long.

Dan and John sitting on the dock in front of our condo enjoying the wide water.

The Pierpoint office manager asked which unit we will be buying. I told her it was D5. She said “wide water view, how did you get that one?” Usually wide water views are sold internally by word of mouth. It is very rare for a wide water view to be sold by a real estate agent. The unit was built in 1974 and purchased by the current owner in 1978. The mother passed away and the two daughters inherited the unit. The daughters never lived in the unit. They rented it out so they never got to know the other residents. Therefore no one had the inside track. We were fortunate to have been looking at another unit listed by the same realtor. She told us the wide water view unit was coming on the market on Friday. We were there to help the realtor open the door, made our offer and the unit was sold within five minutes. We will be back in May for the walk through and the closing. Then we will return in October to start the rehab to get it ready for next year.

On Wednesday we will cruise 53 miles to St. Augustine where we will stay for two days. It is very blowy tonight but should start to settle down in the morning.

Bonus photo

Carl (Chef) Wooden – quote of the day

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Stipetić – born 5 September 1942), known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, author, actor and opera director.

Herzog is considered one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schröter, and Wim Wenders. Herzog’s films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature. French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog “the most important film director alive.” American film critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.” He was named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time magazine in 2009.